There is glamour on the Harbor at night, cast by the tentacles of mist that reach up between the boards of the wharf; by lights caught in the net of the sea; and by the sensuous smell of Ocean - arousing needs that have no remedy.
The people of the Harbor are a pensive lot from their close acquaintance with the moody sea. Walking alone or drinking together - they are really always alone; the fellowship is an illusion. When they gather against the infinities that oppress them to feast on scrap fish and cheap wine, a raucousness arises among them, but listen: their laughter is as haunted as gulls' cries and their talk is of uncertainties: boats and fish, weather, other coasts. They're drawn without knowing why to the tentative edges of the world where land and water and fog share a restless peace. Rich fishermen, poor fish cutters and dockworkers, whores, netbuilders, beachcombers and wharfrats of both sexes - whether they prosper or live in elaborate shacks made of packing crates - the life they never seem to seek is the one away from the sea. A man or woman may be stupid as a cod or cruel as a shark, but no one who lives on that shifting edge escapes the glamour of the Harbor.
Death is perfectly at home in the Harbor, as violence is, and wreckage of all kinds - but the sea has no regrets. The morning after it has done its worst work or witnessed some terrible wrong, everything seems so innocent, forgiven. The creatures, die, and that is all. The playful dolphins and childlike otters, bellowing seals; the gulls, who scream always of death; the fish in their mindless millions - and so, too, the people. Why not? They are not truly of the sea, anyway; they are only the neighbors' children. So each morning, grey or bright, is a creation, and the intricate pattern of vice and beauty and mytery that shifts and glimmers like light on dark water, is gone where the night went.
Sometimes the dead things on the beach are very strange - not human, not mammal, not fish or bird, more like the twisted driftwood that takes the shape of pig and snake and fish and hippogriff all at once; perhaps some child of the sea, of which she is especially protective - something hideous to us but loved by the sea as fiercely as a beautiful woman will love her deformed child, knowing that great beauty and the great ugliness alike are freaks of nature: unsought, undeserved, and each burdened by a terrble separateness between the Chosen and the rest. But suppose it were not alone, this sea-born gargoyle, but one of a species long submerged, with the bulging eyes of deepsea things and phosporescence to light its deformities, so it might swim with its kind, their repulsive mouths agape to receive their prey, baring scimitar fangs. . . Mother Sea has loved things every bit as monstrous in all her ages.
Every maritime culture knows the mermaid in some form, but the sweet-faced charmer who reigns over so many tavern signs is of relatively recent origin. The fishy "people" who caused so many deaths at sea in olden times were not always described as pretty. They were known to the ancients as monstrous, soulless, their resemblance to our kind perhaps in the rough shape and size of skull (a large head to make room for our curious monkey-minds) and perhaps possessed of digited "hands"; or of hairlike strings, mingled with kelp: the snakes of the Gorgon. The hair of the siren.
Eyewitness accounts have always been rare, met with disbelief, and often undergoing the sea-changes of human nature. But, just as "savages" will often give a more accurate account of their habitat than a "scientifically trained" observer, it is wrong to suppose that the ancient sailors were merely ignorant or superstitious. So if some benighted "native" ever tells you it's going to rain in spite of official weather reports - carry your raingear. The sailors of the old times were natives of the sea. Knew her as no modern watcher of radar or sonar ever will: as lover and enemy, beauty and death.
But I am neither sailor nor scientist - just a wharfrat with a camera, trying to save or decipher the messages left on the beach: the patterns of driftwood and seashell and birdprint that appear like the designs of a huge kaleioscope turning with the tide. And so I walked alone on the beach that Sunday morning after the storm, while most of the harbor slept off whatever they needed to sleep off, with my sturdy manual 35mm hung around my neck like an old sin.
That's why I was the one who found it, washed up in a picturesque assemblage of seaweed and seajunk. The first thing I noticed was that its arms had no joints - they must have moved like eels - but it had hands: five digits with ribbed, fin-like membranes between each long "finger."
The head was large with a bulging forehead like a dolphin's, and the face was set high on the skull. The thing that intrigued me most was that it had what looked like a cord, contrived of gut or sinew, around its - well, its neck, I suppose. And it was that cord - a thing which spoke of craft - that impelled me to turn the thing over, though God knows it made me sick to touch it.
Along its spine it bore several rows of troublesome looking growths, some wickedly sharp and some worm-like, and careflly avoiding contact with these (for the spines of some fish are poisonous) I squeamishly flopped my find over, so that it lay propped on its gruesome spinal growths.
I can still see that face in the worst bad dreams: the eyes in death protruding with fishy fanaticism from a face like a nest of larvae. And its color - a sickly green-white indicated that in a dimmer light the creature would be rendered even more frightful by phosphorescence.The maw was voracious, occupying too much of the face for anyone to suspect this creature of being harmless. The teeth were long and curved and sharp. A predator; a fierce, fantastic child of the sea.
With an artifact around its neck.
An artifact: a thing made. Made of shell, cunningly shaped and glued together and made of many pieces, too; clever, ingenious - but not, I think, an ornament. No, all its shapings and pieces were functional and amusingly familiar, from the little, moveable calcium buttons and levers to the large symmetrical barnacle-like piece affixed to the front and fitted with a beautifully ground crystal. It was not exactly like my own, but it was close: white instead of black, more organic than recilinear.
Still, it could only be a camera.
Well, photographers arean odd lot.
Who hasn't heard of some ardent picture-taker stepping back distractedly to get a longer view of the landscape - and stepping right over a cliff? Who hasn't seen the shots of daredevil camera nuts on the wings of biplanes when flight was new? This one must have gone too far to get a better shot. Too far - and now it was dead, as dead as the driftwood I had first taken it for. An old word came to mind: "mortling," an old English word for something found dead. And this was the find of the century!
I checked my film supply - eleven shots left - and began to circle the mortling, looking for the best angles, marking, as always, the deceptive nature of fog diffused light. I lay on my stomach and held my breath (it smelled very bad) and shot; I walked around it, shooting now and then, avoiding anything tricky and just concentrating on clear, easy-to- read pictures, good composition, and detail. The eleven shots were quickly gone, so I climbed the rocks to the jetty, where my rush to the darkroom would not be slowed by slogging through soft sand. I had just gotten onto the walkway when I heard a great roaring wave, rushing toward me against all reason out of that grey, listless sea! There was no time - no time at all.
I woke not too long after to a calm sea and an astonishingly clean beach: no driftwood, no seaweed, no mortling. My head had a large lump and a small cut on it, and I knew how lucky I'd been, all right. I might have died - been killed, you know.
I didn't feel too safe hanging around the strangely unpredictable ocean that day. My camera was apparently unbroken, so I headed back to the trailer (my trailer is all I need: part bedroom, part darkroom) to clean it and examine it for damage.The camera was fine. These things are tough.
The film, of course, was a complete loss, and I knew I could never even tell anyone outside the Harbor about the corpse I saw on that beach. Not without photos! So it became a story of the Harbor, like all the others. Like the phantom boat that prowls these waters and the old man who will walk right by you on the wharf, but who can never be touched, because is isn't solid, and the sad lady who is said to appear to fishermen before a bad storm.
All those stories and more are told in this harbor and in other harbors, and I know that the mortling's story will live in other harbors, too. Maybe other coasts and in other languages.
The thing is: I wasn't supposed to see the mortling - but having seen it was not too terrible an offense, because Harbor tales are not much believed anywhere else. It's easy to see why, too, with all the changes my poor mortling has gone through in this very harbor in just the few years since I found it.
A true account - and this is the only true one - becomes legend before the teller is even gone from the docks.
But pictures! That can't be allowed, and the poor misshapen creature I tried to photograph paid a much higher price than I did - but then, I stayed on the beach - on my own territory, you might say.
So, no, I have no evidence, if that's all you care about; I told you what happened to the film.
But it's still a good story, and worthy, I think, of the glamour of this Harbor night.
